Rift.io, BT, Sprint, 20 others join Open Source MANO NFV community

BARCELONA, Spain -- A group of 23 service providers and solution vendors including BT (NYSE: BT), Rift.io and Sprint (NYSE: S) have joined the Open Source MANO (OSM) community, which is focused on meeting requirements for orchestration of production NFV networks.

OSM, which is holding a demonstration during this week's Mobile World Congress show here, is focused on delivering an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models.

"At Intel's booth, they are having a big demo of the open source MANO software that RIFT.io will be part of along with Telefonica and Canonical," said George Hamilton, senior director of product marketing for Rift.io, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "Our contribution to the software is network resource orchestration and service orchestration, meaning we're responsible for doing deployment automation in the NFV network."

Working in conjunction with ETSI, OSM is an operator-led community designed to meet the requirements of production NFV networks such as a common Information Model (IM) that has been defined, implemented and released in open source software.

Founding members of OSM include a who's who list of service providers and software vendors including Telefónica, BT, Canonical, Intel, Mirantis, Rift.io, Telekom Austria Group and Telenor, along with other initial participants such as Benu Networks, Brocade, Comptel, Dell, Indra, Korea Telecom, Metaswitch, RADWare, Red Hat, Sandvine, SK Telecom, Sprint, Telmex, xFlow and 6WIND.

OSM said it will work with the community to deliver a production-quality open source MANO stock under Apache Public License 2.0.

Already, the initial OSM code base is capable of orchestrating complex NFV use cases using vendor-neutral Information Models capable of capturing all the key features of the E2E service and the requirements of the individual components (Virtual Network Functions, a.k.a. VNFs).

Rift.io, a provider of open source standard platforms to construct and automate deployment of scalable, virtualized network services, is one of the key players in developing OSM

"Rift.io's mission is to be able to make it easy to deploy a network service as it is to deploy any other cloud service and accelerate the adoption of SDN and NFV," Hamilton said. "It's completely model-driven and adheres to everything we have contributed back to OSM so it's OSM compliant management and orchestration.

By creating a community-based code that can orchestrate NFV scenarios, OSM can create what it claims to be a certainty around the information model that is consumed. This will allow the vendors to deliver their solutions rapidly and in a cost-effective manner to their customers.

OSM is expected to enable a wide ecosystem of NFV components -- including VNFs and MANO solutions -- compliant with such modeling.

The organization's project scope covers both resource and service orchestration to allow automated deployment and interconnection of all components, both for NFV network scenarios and the management of network service life cycles.